Will masks mean the end of smiling at strangers?

I’ve been a regular runner for 40 years, pounding my way across Hampstead Heath to Kenwood House and back. This year, thanks to a combination of heart surgery and coronavirus, I’ve become a walker, and my perspective has changed. Walking is a genial activity, requiring you to open yourself up to the world around you. Running is the opposite, a private battle with personal pain. You can see it etched on runners’ faces. They don’t smile until it’s over. I don’t think I shall take it up again. The pain of running once conditioned my life. Now I’m a walker it’s a great relief to experience, and convey, pleasure.

One of the strangely endearing things about Zoom is its visual quality. Over the years television appearances have been fine-tuned by make-up and lighting departments to ensure that we all look as good, and as similar, as possible. On Zoom we look as we really are, and generally rather worse, but with giveaways such as bookshelves, pictures on walls, the impromptu appearance of a child asking for a biscuit, we are exposed warts and all, without being tidied up for public consumption.